Birds of Paradise: A Novel (27 page)

Avis sat motionless, staggered by the moment, barely able to hear or think, while Felice explained the “deal.” Felice would agree to more of these meetings—occasional, entirely at her whim—but in exchange, Avis and Brian had to agree to
stop
.

“Stop?” Avis felt so slow, the word blurred and heavy. Here was her daughter before her, talking to her, as if nothing at all had changed. Here was Felice.

“Looking for me. Trying to make me come back. Hiring people to find me. You have to give up now.” Felice’s tone was like a chip of ice. “Because I’m happy with the way things are. And I am never, ever, coming home again.” Felice gazed at her mother with an expression so entirely frank—so separate—that it seemed to Avis that she felt a wave of particles rising and twisting; each particle was a bit of memory, every second that she’d held the child between her arms, inhaled the scent of her scalp, kissed her shoulders, pressed the drowsy face to her chest as she tilted a bottle to her lips, the consummate intimacy of feeding a child this way, all of it rising, curling, as this extraordinary face told her:
stop
.

Could it be that she’d always been a little afraid of her own daughter? That she simply didn’t know how to fight her? The terrible fact presented itself: Avis had no choice but to accept.

“the lady of the house—
she did all she could to take me away from my mother. She told me my mother was ignorant and dark black like an African. But I saw how my mother knew every plant in the gardens and forests, like the lady of the house knew the words in her books.”

There’s rain on the streets and occasional ripples of light, high up overhead. Avis can only steal glimpses of Solange as she speaks, her profile nearly invisible beside the rain-streaked glass. “I was seventeen when I met Jonas. The lady sent me into Cap-Haïtien with the driver for some dried hibiscus for tea. We could have picked it right in the field, but she said that kind wasn’t good. Back then, Jonas worked in the market in town, selling spices in big cloth sacks. When she found out about him, the lady said, of course, that he was filthy and uneducated—same things she said about my mother. She wanted me to stay in the house. She said, ‘You are almost a daughter to me.
’
” Solange gave a laugh like a sniff, her head bobbing slightly. “My mother told me—If you’re lucky enough to know what you want, then you must chase it. I left the house and the gardens and the stone verandah that overlooked the ocean—places I’d known all my life—and I went to live with Jonas in a house with a cracked cement floor and a patched tin roof, no electricity. We had to take our waste out in pails and pour it into the alley that ran behind the house.” The rain tapers off as they approach Miami Beach; trails of water stand in the street, a mist thrown up between the cars, rows of bronze streetlights glow overhead, already coming on in the late afternoon. “It felt like my life’s door had opened. When my son was born, I began making my bush teas and medicines, to help him thrive. Jonas said these brought him even more customers at market than his spices did. My mother came to visit one time to see her grandson. It took her six hours to walk to us. She said the lady of the house was ill and she couldn’t stay away for very long. I understood. The lady was like a difficult family member—you might dislike, or even hate them a
little
—but you can’t leave them.”

Solange is silent as they cross the causeway, the bands of traffic curving and rushing high over the diamond water. “I’ve never seen this before,” she murmurs. “Only from the airplane.”

They drive into town and park in the city lot, then walk to Lincoln Road. It looks different to Avis, so late in the day—wilder, somehow. She edges toward Solange, turning from the spill of shop lights and electrical music. Girls in skimpy, ruffled shirts look stiff-legged and robotic. Beside Solange—seeing with her fresh eyes—Avis feels as if an unacknowledged horror in things rises more forcefully to the surface. But Solange swings her arms as they walk, looking around: she says, “I wish the lady of the house could have seen
this
—she wouldn’t think she was quite so fine as she did.”

They make their way up the street: as far as the fans’ whirl of shadows on the sidewalk; Avis stops and gestures to the heavy tables, wrought-iron chair legs and bases. “There. That’s where we meet.” There’s a desolation about the place now, though it’s crowded with customers, legs crossed, hands resting on iced drinks. Avis senses a weight, as if all of it is gradually sinking into the earth with all those empty hours of waiting.

Solange takes in the tables and diners: the scene is washed in late, limpid sunlight. Avis wonders what the diners see when they look at them—a pale, middle-aged patient and her young attendant? She feels a flash of trigeminal pain across one cheekbone and inhales sharply. Solange plucks at her sleeve. “Come away. Let’s see some more.”

They weave through the crowds, Avis hurrying to keep up with Solange—a slip of aquamarine skirt. Avis holds a shopping bag that bounces against her legs and bumps into passersby. She feels sweat at her temples and under her arms. The sky is hazy blue with clouds like fine scratches; bisecting the walkway are rows of date palms, full as pom-poms, with powerful, corrugated trunks. Solange hovers at the busy edge of Ocean Drive, waiting within a small crowd for the light. Avis doesn’t think she’s even aware that she’s behind her, but then Solange turns and reaches between two girls to take hold of Avis’s hand. She keeps her strong fingers on her as they cross the street and make their way toward the beach.

Avis doesn’t come here. She hasn’t been this close to the water since she’d agreed to Felice’s terms, years ago. Avis had gone home and told Brian about Felice’s demand. For the first time in months it seemed they were too drained to fight each other. Brian shook his head, saying, “That’s ridiculous. Just let her go? No. No way. There’s got to be something else we can do.” And Avis said, “Please tell me what it is and I’ll do it.” Anything. Anything. She felt the fight slipping away from them, talking about it was running through sand, trying to stand in breakers, the sand swiping away from under their feet. Gradually they stopped speaking with police and school officials and neighborhood watch groups, and Avis never went to the beach again.

She is surprised now by the residual warmth she can feel in the sand; she slips off her clogs, stepping through it, bits of shell and stone and cigarette butts. The late-afternoon-near-evening light is tinged with mauve and it wavers across Solange’s face in pale bands. “The water smells different here,” Solange says.

There are still small groups of college kids on towels, but most of the tourists and families are packing up, lugging folding chairs, a pleasant weariness rising from their burned shoulders. Solange sweeps off a patch of sand with the flat of her hand, as if dusting a piece of furniture, and sits, knees bent and gathered to her chest. Avis hovers uncertainly beside her, finally sitting, the bag with its boxed cake between them. Solange stares hard into the widening band at the far edge of the water. It is hard to tell in the lowering light but Avis suspects that her eyes are rimmed with tears. Avis shifts her gaze to the sand—a cream-colored shell, a stone, the delicately ridged exoskeleton of a horseshoe crab. “It’s been so long since I’ve visited the water,” Solange says. “I grew up beside it, but after so many years I thought I might even forget it.” She rakes her fingers through the sand. “It’s good to feel like this now.”

“Like what?” Avis shades her eyes.

“Like nothing.” She smiles. “When I came here, I came with nothing. Just that bird in a cage. The one you love so much.” Another smile.

“And your husband,” Avis prompts. “You came with him.”

She glances at Avis. “Yes. And him.” She begins unpacking the items in her bag then. She touches each one to her forehead, then hands it to Avis. “Think about what you would like to say to your daughter now.”

Avis takes the small jar with its clear fluid, but she can’t think of anything to say. Mostly there’s blankness, as Solange puts it—like nothing. Still, she touches the things—the scissors, the satin sash, the prayer book—and hands each back to Solange.

“Good,” she says. “Fine. And now what you need to do—you take the cake and break it up, scatter it on the water for the birds and fishes.” She points over the shadowy waves. “You talk to your daughter as you scatter it.”

“The cake—you mean, just break it up?” She feels a kind of
flinch.

Solange’s face is impassive. “However you can do it.”

Avis stands and reaches into the bag, into the white box, carefully lifting the cake with her fingers. She holds it in both hands and walks down the incline to the water. The sand looks beige against the dark foam of the surf and Avis hesitates a moment before wading in. The water is warm and easy and the bottom smooth. She is able to make her way through the small breakers with little trouble. She doesn’t look back at shore; she walks until the water approaches her hips, her work pants balloon around her, the houndstooth check darkening. The thought comes, how she might have viewed all this in the past: sentimental, maudlin.
Happy Birthday
. Bitter little words. Avis holds the cake then digs in with her fingers. It crumples instantly and she has a memory, not of Felice, but of spreading handfuls of her mother’s ashes into Cayuga Lake, so cold that March it was still frozen in spots, and she had balanced on the steeply banked shore, almost doubled over from the cold, flinging the ashes with stiff, red fingers. Now she tosses the crumbs everywhere, her breath chugging as if she were sobbing; the sound bounces over the water. She knows that this ritual is not for getting her child back. There’s a sparkle of efflorescence on the water’s surface, just a few feet away; she wades in deeper, toward the bubbles, then feels an uncanny shimmer against her exposed calves: a school of fish is swarming her, feeding on the crumbs. She watches them, minute flickerings beneath the surface. A bit of cake bobs on the water, rising and falling. She sinks to her chin, then lifts her feet and lets her head dunk under so the echo of the water fills her ears, the thrombotic pulse. She opens her eyes to an indigo blur and considers the pleasure of opening her throat and lungs—the scorch in her lungs and the release of it.

Avis tilts her head back, pushing off the sandy bottom. She breaks the surface to see a ragged shadow plummet—a seagull snapping up the cake, lobbing back into the sky.

SOLANGE TURNS TOWARD
the passenger side window as they pass over the causeway, the water a navy field trembling with lights. “I’m going to come back here.”

“I’ll take you anytime,” Avis says.

Solange looks at her again with her cool, curious gaze, then something seems to release in her eyes, as if she were looking right through Avis; turning back to the window she says, “I have to go get him.”

Avis glances at her, but a kind of heavy, silencing drapery seems to have fallen over the car, separating the two women. She drives Solange back to her home, pulling into the driveway behind a black sedan. The house lights glow and a form moves behind the curtains. Solange doesn’t get out of the car right away. She stares at her lap, then mumbles
“Bonne chance”
as she kisses Avis’s cheek.

“Bonne chance?”
Avis smiles, but Solange climbs out of the car in silence. Avis sits with her hands draped on the wheel, a wisp of melancholy in her chest as she watches the woman walk to the door of her house, enter, and close the door.

Felice

H
EAT LIGHTNING FLICKERS IN THE NIGHT, FLASHES
with a violet after-image. Felice walks the empty beach with Reynaldo and Berry, the three of them bumping into each other, their voices absorbed in the salt air. She feels light as the dry lightning, casting no shadows. She spent the day lying out on the beach with Berry, dozing and eating candy, just as if the two of them were college girls on vacation. Only the vacation doesn’t end. If she were home . . . For a moment, she allows herself to imagine the sort of birthday cake her mother would make, the scent of baking, the rosettes sculpted in fondant. For all she knows, everyone from her old life could be dead—like Hannah used to say. Everyone that she’s ever loved vanished.

They walk to the public restrooms, a squat cinder-block building, and enter the women’s room. It’s deserted and echoing at this hour. There’s a grit of sand coating the sinks and masking the mirrors. They wash themselves with the trickle of cold water at the sinks under beige-green lights: Reynaldo’s and Berry’s skin looks mottled and scaly along the backs of their arms. Felice frowns at her own hazy reflection, tries to smooth her hair, but then Reynaldo shakes his head and says, “You’re not allowed to look at yourself. You’re such a freak of nature—it’s disgusting.”

Berry makes snatching gestures at Felice. “I’ll take your eyes, skin, hair, lips, and body—thank you very much.”

Felice grabs Berry’s hand and they play wrestle. “What’re you even talking about?” She laughs, pushing on Berry’s hand. They dance around, stamping in the gray puddles on the floor. “You guys are way cuter than me.”

Reynaldo snaps his fingers. “Do not do that. Do not even say that to me, bitch. I’m a have you arrested.”

Felice feels hungry and good from all the pot they’d smoked and a little baggie of cocaine they’d shared with Heinrich—a couple of birthday snorts. They leave the restroom and walk up the cool carpet of sand in the moonlight, and Felice feels like they own the beach. She’s put Emerson out of her mind: a distant figure, he might be one of the flakes of moonlight sparkling on the waves. Felice skips into a scissoring jump, throws down her board and tries to do a cartwheel. After a few attempts both Berry and Felice manage crude cartwheels. They laugh wildly and turn one after another, kicking up sand. Reynaldo sits on the beach, watching. Finally Felice picks up her board and they head toward town, shaking sand out of their hair and beating it from their hands.

There’s the usual din of people parading along Ocean Drive. Felice can feel the throb of a bass a full block before she hears the music. It’s hot out but there are still long lines for outside tables at the cafés; rental cars ease down the street, girls sitting on top, legs dangling into sunroofs; music blares out of the Versace mansion, the Time café, a row of expensive boutiques. Even just a year ago, Felice still enjoyed this scene, the stalk through the crowd with her friends, all of them long-legged, hair bubbling down their backs. Now she feels remote from everything. Some college kid in a T-shirt that says
no limitZ
lets an enormous plastic cup fall from his fingers to the sidewalk. Black fluid sprays everywhere. She has started to notice the garbage. When she was fourteen, the beach was enchanted. But now she sees that people come for a long weekend, a week perhaps, that it’s a temporary enchantment, that people behave here in ways they never would back in Naperville and Houston and Scranton. Felice once talked to a girl at a bar who was amazed to hear that Felice had been born and raised in Miami. “No way, you’re from here?” The girl’s face was sun-scorched with pale rings around her eyes. “This isn’t a place where people really
live
.”

They leave Ocean Drive and walk over to Washington where the sonic boom of the clubs intensifies. Velvet-roped lines stretch along the sidewalks and girls in lingerie dresses and towering shoes eye Felice with arch faces. The night swishes with languages: Portuguese, French, Russian, Arabic, intertwined with cigarette smoke and the smell of alcohol and perfume. Everyone awaiting the moment of entry. When Felice’s friend William, at Cloud 9, stashes her board and unhooks the rope to let them pass, the waiting girls’ eyes narrow; cigarette smoke streams between manicures. In their jeans and tank tops, Felice and Berry never wait for entry and never pay an admission fee. They enter the club’s bolus of dancing, pulsating lighting and noise. The place is a Roman circus of floors and lobbies: there are circular metal staircases and semi-private nooks for snorting and smoking and screwing. A series of spotlights synced to the music strobes the crowd, so amplified Felice feels its throb in her rib cage. She’s happy to be here again, inside the animating charge. The music pauses, shifts, and Felice watches the crowd pause and shift, as if jolted by a live current. Just the way silvery schools of small fish swerve in tandem. The dance floors are tidal—all movement and turbulence—swept into an internal sea.

They club-hop, visiting a series of dance floors, a series of velvet ropes unhooked. Berry tells their friends that it’s Felice’s birthday and Reynaldo crows, “She’s
eighteen
—you believe that shit? She’s one of
them
now.” People buy them shots. They see kids from the beach, from the tattoo shop, from the Green House—including one of Emerson’s skinhead friends, Anders. He tells Felice, “Emerson’s really worried about you, man.”

In the ladies’ room at the third or fourth club, Felice and Berry are offered E, then something that’s dripped on the tongue from an eyedropper. Felice nibbles at the sour edge of a pill and gives the rest to Berry. After Berry squeezes the eyedropper under her tongue, her pupils dilate to the outer rims of her irises. “Mmm. Yeah.” She says to Felice, “Have you noticed how everyone here is super ugly?” She sits on the edge of the shelf of sinks, her body long and narrow as an insect’s. Like Felice, she could make money if she showed up more often for shoots. “Don’t you think they’re such trolls?” She hunches over, hunting in her jeans pockets for a cigarette. A flurry of women rush in and out, crowding
the long mirror, applying mascara, shaking out their hair, chattering, tugging at their clothes. Berry could say or do anything, Felice marvels, and they wouldn’t notice a thing. Felice has lost track of how many Cuba Libres she’s consumed this evening; there’s a smoky tang in her sinuses and the floor seems to slope. She leans against Berry’s sharp knees. “I think they’re sweet,” she says plaintively.

Berry exhales smoke. “Uggums. Big Chief Uggoos.”

“We could be sisters, did you ever think of that?” Felice pinches the cigarette from Berry and takes a steadying drag. For a moment, she feels as if she and Berry are incredibly close. “Isn’t it weird? All you have to do is hang around somebody long enough and you start to love them. Everyone in this club—we could all be one family.”

Berry squints, trying to locate her cigarette. “You want to love an uggoo?”

“There’s no such thing as the one perfect something or other,” she says indignantly, as if they were arguing. “Anyone can be in love with anyone. Doesn’t matter.” She waves Berry’s cigarette just out of reach. “Could be some drooling three-eyed dirt-bag out there—you could fall in love with him!” Felice feels unusually wise—as if the meaning of the night has revealed itself to her. Love is exchangeable, malleable: she traded one family for this other kind of family.

“Oh yeah?” Berry reclaims her cigarette. “There’s this big fat nasty rich, rich uggum I saw at the VIP bar. I want to see you go in there and fall in love with him.”

“You kidding?” Felice’s voice clatters in the pink marble room. The sinks are stunningly white, like starlight. “Easy.”

Berry slides off the counter with a whoop.

The club interior seems darker and damper now. There are several beach-rat kids out there, all dancing. Reynaldo is on the dance floor; Felice spots him rocking his hips, hands above his head; his face gleams, impervious as a totem. Berry slips her hand under Felice’s elbow and nods toward the penthouse bar. They climb the narrow spiral staircase. The throng upstairs has diminished to a ring of serious drinkers—almost all men—leaning on the bar, glass in hand, most of them watching the dancers. Felice spots the one Berry was talking about—a type that appears in all the clubs. Felice knows—guys like this are admitted because they’re rich. He’s shortish with a thick neck and shoulders; hair sprouts from the opening of his creamy shirt. The man holds his bottle of beer around the neck with his fingertips, and he appears to be wearing clear nail polish. He’s balding at the temples with a deep V of hair in the center of his forehead. His eyes are furtive, almost hurt, damp and animal. At first Felice shrinks back, but Berry hovers beside her, smirking, and Felice begins to feel untouchable, a deep, euphoric solitude. She’s outgrown the sort of life she’s been leading—alone and broke and afraid of things. This is it, she thinks. There’s a volley of music, a thumping, computer-generated bass line, and a shift and surge roars through the dance floor. Time to be judged.

“I’m not afraid of him!” Felice shouts at Berry.

“What?” Berry cups her ear.

It’s critical that she not back down from this man: if she does, then it’s all been a waste and she’s still just a weak, frightened, irredeemable nothing. Felice is holding her breath as she approaches the bar, her jaw clamped, spine erect. Not afraid anymore. The man notices her immediately. He fixes on her with those eyes, as if she’s late and he’s been waiting. “Hello,” she says, unable to smile, stopping a few feet away. There’s someone with him, a nonentity in a business suit, half turned toward the bar.

“What’s your name?” the first man shouts at her.

“What’s yours?” she shouts back, edging closer.

He says something she can’t hear. He shouts again, it sounds like “Marren.”

She says, “Is that your first name or last name?”

He frowns and shakes his head, then he holds up his beer, lifts his eyebrows.

“Rum and Coke,” Felice shouts. The man beside Marren signals the bartender for a round. Marren leans forward, extending his hand, Felice assumes, in order to shake hers, but instead he takes her by the wrist, his thumb pressing the bundle of nerves at her pulse, and tows her in. She takes awkward steps. Felice glares at her friend but Berry doesn’t budge.

“Is your little friend watching us?” Marren asks, his mouth close to her ear, his breath warm on her neck. “Does she like to watch?” He holds her wrist, his thumb stroking it casually. He hands her a tall glass filled with crushed mint: it smells crisp and sweet. With her free hand, she holds the glass close to her nose, inhaling the fragrance. Energy whips across her body, wicking through the tips of her fingers. The air in the club takes on the ammonia tang of swabbed hallways and chalkboards and sweat and anxiety. The dance floor could be the commotion of the halls outside the music room.

That was years ago. She’s another person now. Felice yanks her wrist out of his grip, hard. She’s been on her own, making her own way, for five years—she’s fed herself, bought condoms, learned how to deal with her monthly cramps, learned how to keep a roof over her head. She didn’t get lost in the streets like other kids she met—unraveling into prostitution, alcoholism, meth, crack, their skin turned gray, faces sinking into skulls, their young teeth rotting away. Now she puts one hand on a hip, untouchable. Marren smiles, palms up—unarmed. His friend has turned back toward the bar. Hannah wasn’t afraid of anything—even when she should have been. Felice comes closer to the man, daring him in some way. Marren looks exhilarated, his eyes wide, head lowered. She says, “Today’s my birthday!”

He lifts his eyebrows and removes something from the breast pocket of his shirt, holding it up. A long silver-link necklace with a silver pear about the size of a marble. Felice is used to receiving jewelry from men—she pawns anything she can and gives away the rest. But this is unusual. For her thirteenth birthday, not long before she ran away for good, Stanley made her a baked pear in a
crème anglaise
. She no longer ate her mother’s pastries by that point, but the pear flesh was soft as custard: she ate it sitting on the edge of her bed while Stanley watched from the doorway, and left only a stem and seeds. Now she keeps her face impassive, not letting on how much she wants the necklace. “I was saving this,” the man is saying, his mouth again close to her ear. “This was supposed to be for another girl, but maybe I’ll give it to you.”

Eventually Berry joins them and together she and Felice flirt with Marren. The girls laugh, teasing each other, amusing themselves, dancing in place. It’s late and there’s an overripe, exhausted quality to the night. Felice doesn’t want any more drinks but Marren buys them sugary mint cocktails. She accepts his beige tablets, then palms them, whatever they are, to Reynaldo, who gulps them down, then moves back onto the dance floor, eyes fluttering, his face blissful. Marren’s friend J.T. barely speaks; he leans on the bar, his head pointed toward the corner of the room. But Marren is in no hurry: he laughs with the girls and fawns over Felice, calling her
princess
. After an hour or so, Marren produces the necklace again and dangles it in front of Felice. “It’s yours—if you come with me . . .”

Felice slides a look at Berry, who grows alert, a tiny smile sharpening her expression.

“It’s platinum,” he says. “Pure platinum, from Cartier. You ever hear of them?”

Felice rolls her eyes. The music has deescalated—or her hearing has adapted to the noise—they can carry on something more like conversation. “Duh—I hope so.”

“Platinum is the most precious metal there is. This is worth, like, ten times more than white gold.” It ticks back and forth, a needle of light. “You know what this thing cost? You won’t even believe it.”

“It’s low-class to talk about stuff like that,” Berry says, delighted.

“Just guess. Who cares? I’m a low-class guy. Some girls like it.”

“I don’t know,” Felice says. “Just tell us.”

“Twenty-four thousand.”

“Bullshit.” Berry laughs.